The recent burgeoning of social networking computing systems and multi-user virtual computer environments is creating a significant demand for multiperson-to-multiperson communication.
Currently, the communication tools available to virtual communities are limited to asynchronous communications (e.g. chat, email, messaging) or to telephony-style one-to-one interaction. While some work is being done in the area of “immersive communications”, the area still requires significant work to overcome certain bandwidth limitations.
Immersive communications provide aural and visual scenes created for the user that are similar to his/her perceptions when mingling with a real crowd of people. For example, the voices of other people in the virtual crowd are spatially placed in the audio scene of the listener in perfect harmony with their respective virtual locations. Similarly, the videos of other participants are appropriately placed within the visual range of the viewer. Note that the term ‘immersive’ is not limited to the use of immersive display technology, such as Virtual Reality Head-Mounted Displays or Cave Automatic Virtual Environment (CAVE). The term ‘immersive’ is used broadly to refer to the availability of appropriate information within visual and aural scenes. In many scenarios, a simple monitor or even a hand-held display may be sufficient to provide an immersive experience.
Immersive multimedia communication is fundamentally a multipoint-to-multipoint communication system. The multimedia information generated by each user, such as his/her voice and video or user-generated content, must reach a subset of other participants in real time. This subset will change dynamically as a result of movements of users within the virtual crowd and is affected by the presence of barriers, walls and other virtual artifacts within the environment. It may also depend on the propagation characteristics of the media through the virtual environment. Sound, for example, may propagate through walls but visual information cannot.
There has been little research into the viability of multipoint to multipoint communication systems.